How One of NYC's Best Chinese Chefs Makes Fried Rice | Bon Appétit

I had the three piece working for delivery and then what just came in oh sorry let me just pop this in the fryer and then I will chaotic situations frier is bubbling away we are very much open for business right now so uh we're going to make this happen but it's going to be great hi I'm Eric Wang I'm the chef and founder of pecking house in Brooklyn New York today we're going to make my perfect fried [Music] rice I've trained in New York as a chef for the last 12 years I was a cook

at gr's Tavern and then most recently I was was a su chef at 11 Masson Park and then when the pandemic started my family's restaurant got locked down so I started frying chicken and thus it has become my life the reason fried rice tastes different in a restaurant than the kind you have at home it's usually thanks to these very intense walk burners that look like Rocket Fuel great seasoning emulsified rice every grain is going to be covered in a light slick of oil and then high heat that's the flavor we're trying to cultivate by

using these really intense walks over here so this is going to be a chicken fried rice just like the one that my mom makes in her restaurant the one I grew up in and the first step is to marinate the chicken with a Technique we call velveting velveting is a technique to prepare proteins for stir fries it really improves their texture keeps them really moist and gives them a nice bouncy texture so egg whites obviously have protein and they are slightly alkaline and that alkaline texture is actually going to tenderize the protein a little bit

and that's what gives those stir fry ingredients you get in your Chinese takeout that unique texture okay um CH sandwich swi P that sandwich chilio okay so we're going to cut this into very thin strips this is chicken breast boneless skinless you can use chicken thigh you can use whatever you want we're aiming for kind of like needly consistency not quite spaghetti but maybe a little thicker than that what should we say butini so normally in a Chinese restaurant at least how we would do it at my mom's place we would freeze these slice them

on a deli slicer and then cut them into strips it's a little harder to do with fresh chicken why is Chinese cuisine such thin portions of me whereas like a lot of Western cooking is these giant roast and such like that I learned recently is because China is considered quite poor in fuel as in like wood and uh combustible fuel so they generally prepare things to be cooked as quickly as possible whereas there were a great deal of forest in Europe and that's why you can create these big fires and big bread and such and

such my mom would probably tell me to cut these thinner but you know this is what we're doing here it'll cook very quickly so we have our chicken strips We're going to add a little salt some cornstarch corn starch is going to allow the protein to hold on to a little bit of moisture by hydrating and then we're going to add a little baking soda again alkalinity is going to tenderize proteins a little bit this is going to give it the texture of that great Chinese American dish chicken and broccoli that really nice slippery and

bouncy texture of a thinly sliced piece of chicken that is not a achievable unless you do this step okay so we have our chicken velvety we're going to put this away for a second and then we're going to address the [Music] rice so D rice is the key to fried rice it's the history you know using leftover rice how would you bring it back to life and make it something delicious it is crystalized the starches in it have made it hard but it makes it great for stir fry cuz it's going to be really loose

and fluffy it's going to hold on the fat for a little bit and that's what gives grap fried rice this awesome texture so this would be rice that is drying out overnight we got racks and racks and racks of it and as you see after we fluff it we pack in these containers and then we get ready to Fred rice during service at home since you're doing a small quantity I wouldn't worry about it too much if you got it that white takeout carton you just didn't finish your rice from your takeout meal the night

before it'll be totally fine ready to fry the next day we use jasmine rice in the restaurant all varieties of rice contain a measure of amope pcin it's Ultra exaggerated in risoto rice that makes it really sticky and creamy and then there's less of it in long grain rice which is why it's nice and drier and fluffy and like in individual grains this is very much a really important step fluffing the rice cooking your rice the day before at least then taking the time the next day to run through it massage it all into these

beautiful little fluffy grains so if you're making fried rice at home and you see that it has become a congealed clumpy Mass unappetizing it is because you have skipped this step and your ancestors would be disappointed yeah you run out of rice what do you do oh man you're screwed dude you're fo my mom's going to yell at you you can use fresh rice what you could do is you could use slightly less water when you're cooking your rice that will prevent it from being super sticky so you would get something that's a little closer

to the ideal texture of fried rice so our rice is fluffed lovingly going to put this in a separate container if I was really slick I would do the parchment slide but I don't trust myself on camera let's see please hold yeah so we're going to prep the rest of our ingredients it's really important when making fried rice any sort of stir fry uh that everything is as close to ready as possible most things that cook and walk they only take about 45 seconds to a minute it happens really fast so it's really important that

you have everything ready you're well prepared and then you're off to the raises all right we're going to make our eggs we're going to scramble them up and it's a very inexpensive and easy way to add protein to the dish it just has a wonderful texture to it obviously they're not going to be creamy scrambled they're going to be kind of firmly set but it eats really well with all the fluffy rice that we're going to make I said fluffy how many times today so we're going to beat them all out whisk them nicely and

get them ready for our fried rice some would say I should use chopsticks believe it or not I don't have Chopsticks in this restaurant great dishonor and shame we're going to dice some onion up when you're stir frying vegetables even for fried rice you don't want them to be too soft we want to texture that it still has a little bit of bite it's not too mushy so can't be too small can Lopez calls it Tender Crisp I think that's a great term I don't add garlic to fried rice I think it's a little much

everyone thinks like anytime you cook something Chinese it has to have garlic ginger and scallions in it that's not true then we're going to do our scallions going to separate them into the dark green and then the light green and the whites are going to go together we're going to cook these first they're a little bit more pungent but they're going to add a really nice foundation and savoriness to it and then we're just going to finish with the dark green part so as color has pungency has Aroma my mom has a Chinese restaurant on

Long Island her original restaurant was in Queen it was called peeking house her and my father were servers there the owner sold it to my parents I grew up taking phone calls takeout orders reservations busting tables learned a lot about life also going in this thing we got peas and carrots very classic for Chinese takeout restaurants and adds a really nice bit of color and texture we're going to add soy sauce to our fried rice to add salinity to add Umami savoriness you're going to add the soy sauce around the edge just so it Cooks

down a little bit reduces just very slightly you don't want it to be too wet but you do also want to add all that color Aroma and salinity there's a very specific technique when you're stir frying things you're adding your seasonings your liquid seasonings along the edge of the pan the only other seasonings besides soy sauce salt and MSG you can't have grap fried rice without some degree of MSG it is simply a salt it is glutamates it's what activates in your tongue and your brain to develop that flavor of savoriness what Japanese people call

Umami and you should have in your home it's very useful so we like to add a little butter to our fried rice not traditional but rice and butter are great friends it works really well you just need a little bit kind of brings the whole party together ties the room together if you will okay we got everything ready to go here again this is come together really quickly and we're going to make some fried rice all right we got our chicken velveted here I'm going to do a pass through and the idea here is to

set the texture cook the chicken through obviously before we stirfry everything so we have everything ready beforehand then the rice comes together very quickly it's called the pasture just because you're cooking it very quickly usually you just pass it through hot oil because you have this like almost paper thin slice of protein it Cooks in like 30 seconds we can also do it in water it just changes the fat content of where you're trying to cook if you're stir frying something you might want that oil but since fried rice we're going to add oil and

we can just use water unlike in Western cooking you're not trying to get a fond by searing chicken in a walk or a pan or anything like that you just want everything cooked ahead of time you get all the color and the flavor from the soy sauce and the other seasonings if you didn't velvet your chicken you don't need to do a past through you could cook it in the pan beforehand that's totally fine we are cooking this in a walk as it would be done in a Chinese restaurant a very thin sheet of either

cast iron or carbon steel and uh it doesn't retain heat very long because it's very thin but it does transfer very quickly which is why we have these massive jet burners we're looking for something called wak ha it's uh the Cantonese term literally translates to breath of the walk it's that really intense heat that almost Char flavor that you have to a lot of great Chinese cuisine that's difficult to replicate at homes it's from the intense heat that's combusting the fats in your fried rice and your stir fries all oils have a smoke point point

and you can achieve that very quickly by tossing food through the fire of a walk burner it's lightly smoky it's lightly charred and it's it tastes like intense heat if you believe it or not if you have a gas burner you can be tossing your food through the gas burner as we'll see in the stir fry technique but if failing that you could also use a blowtorch all right we have a two ring cantones burner here for this big walk here we need this walk super hot we want the oil to be smoking the second

it hits the pen as you can see it's already starting to smoke going on onions little bit of eggs you want to add the eggs first so that they set you don't want to add them on top of the rice cuz then it emulsifies with the rice it's an entirely different product everything happens really quickly we set the eggs first and then everything comes together all right we're going on Rice we're rocking it against the the sides so that we're cradling it against the flame as much as we can enough oil so that the fried

rice has a bit of a shine we're tossing it over the flame over the gas [Music] burner a noisy Affair all right then we're going to go in with our other seasonings park it for one second going to do some peas and carrots scallions salt and a little bit of MSG fire it up again you always want it to be in motion otherwise it's going to burn a little bit that's not what you want you want charred flavor but you don't want to burn your ingredients soy sauce again we're adding it around the side of

the pan so caramelizes immediately you want it to reduce just ever so slightly as you're making it just as we're almost finishing I'm just going to add the smallest bit of butter it's going to give it a little shine just my personal touch you can kind of learn by experience with the texture and how it falls the grains are no longer hard they're not bouncing around the walk they're almost moving with it in a wave motion that's kind of how you know that it's ready all right this is how you want to be eating your

fried rice when it's hot steaming almost going to burn your mouth nice individual grains no clumps everything's kind of the same size if you eat it with one bite that's good oh hot has that um really lovely texture individual grains light but still has like a light slick of oil to everything peas are nice onions still have a little texture chicken is really silky and bouncy at the same time to me it has just the right amount of salt and MSG it does have that kind of like lightly Smoky Aroma that's really important otherwise fried

rice is just kind of sad and lacking character without it it's going to be difficult to replicate exactly the super intense Heat and the cooking vessel but as long as you get your seasoning right you treat your rice right by cooking it a day before coating it with oil and soy sauce or whatever seasonings you want want to use still going to be a great fried race I don't believe in the idea of perfection but uh it is pretty good I think my mom would say it's pretty good some classic Asian American Childhood it's like

I guess it's all right you could always do better [Music]